German circumcision ban: Muslims and Jews finally come together — to defend circumcision

And so it has come to pass that after centuries of hate, Muslims and Jews finally have been brought together by the human penis — in particular, the shared desire to chop part of it off.

This week, a district court in the German city of Cologne ruled that male circumcision of newborn babies is illegal, except for medical reasons — because the practice causes “irreversible damage against the body” that cannot be excused on the basis of religious freedom. The primary effect will be felt among Germany’s Muslims, of whom there are about 4-million. But the country’s 100,000 Jews will be affected as well.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the Brussels-based Rabbinical Center of Europe, denounced the ruling as a “brutal attack on freedom of religion” and promised a “public relations campaign in cooperation with the Muslim community [that] will do away with misunderstandings and will prevent both intentional and unintentional harm to freedom of religion in Europe.”

The idea of Jews and Muslims jointly destroying “misunderstandings” — through, say, a series of television commercials or YouTube videos featuring “Avi” and “Hussein” earnestly sharing their tolerance-building thoughts on the matter — is admittedly tantalizing. But it also threatens to lay bare some underlying contradictions that could eventually prove fatal for the pro-circumcision cause.

First, there is the question of “religious freedom.” If Jewish and Muslim leaders are claiming the right to mutilate their newborns through an appeal to religious texts and/or cultural tradition, they might as well save their breath. Female genital mutilation, polygamy, forced veiling of girls and women, forced marriages, “honour”-based disciplining of wayward women, and the rejection of blood transfusions for children are all practices rooted in some retrograde combination of cultural and religious tradition. In each case, they have been rejected by Western societies in recent years on the basis that the rights of children (and grown women) are more important than the propagation of beliefs rooted in superstition and patriarchal cruelty. Post-9/11, conservative Jews and Jewish groups have been at the forefront of the campaign to highlight the prevalence of such practices in unassimilated Muslim communities. And so it is odd — hypocritical, even — for these same culture warriors to argue on behalf of circumcision because God wants them to keep doing it.

As societies such as Germany and Canada become progressively more secular, the only arguments that will serve to justify male circumcision are medical in nature. Which is to say: Does the elimination of the penile foreskin help a child lead a longer, healthier life? The Cologne court explicitly accounts for this possibility in its judgment. Yet even on the medical score, there is an awkward contradiction that conservative circumcision proponents don’t like to talk about.

The epidemiology surrounding male circumcision is surprisingly fuzzy. But it is clear that there are risks associated with the practice. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that between 0.2% and 0.6% of circumcised boys experience complications, especially hemorrhage, infection and what is known in the literature by the stomach-turning euphemism of “surgical mishap” (which can include full loss of penis). The American Academy of Family Physicians has estimated a circumcision-related death rate of 1 in 500:000. All this explains why the Fetus and Newborn Committee of the Canadian Pediatric Society has declined to support the routine circumcision of newborn boys.

On the other side of the health ledger, some researchers have argued that circumcision reduces the risk of urinary tract infections, penile cancer and other conditions later in life. Most importantly, circumcision proponents — including the WHO and UNAIDS — argue that the practice helps reduce the risk of AIDS and other sexually born illnesses.

The problem here is that the statistical argument for an AIDS connection tends to be non-existent (or unstudied) in most population groups. Principal exceptions are sub-Saharan African societies, and (with less statistical basis) gay men “who primarily engaged in insertive anal sex.” Which is to say: groups that historically have suffered from a high incidence of medically destructive promiscuity. Among other male populations, including North American heterosexuals, there is still no proof that routine circumcision would have any impact on AIDS rates.

In other words, for Western parents, the strongest medical argument for circumcision now rests, implicitly, on the possibility of a son becoming promiscuous or coming out as gay. These are lifestyle possibilities, of course. But I doubt most traditional Jewish and Muslim types — including Avi and Hussein — like to think about them.